Month: March 2006

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Other

Ashley Cole and gay footballers

Ashley Cole, who plays at left-back for Arsenal and England, has sent his lawyer to complain to Google because at the moment, if you search for ‘Ashley Cole’, it says:

See results for: ashley cole gay

Possibly even more bizarrely, from a legal point of view, he’s suing the News of the World over a story that didn’t even name him. The NOTW claimed “two bisexual stars made some very dirty phone calls – using a mobile phone as a gay sex toy” and published a heavily-photoshopped shot supposedly of them. Some internet detective work suggests that the photo is Ashley Cole.

I have no idea whether Cole is gay, and I dont think it’s anyone else’s business anyway (he’s one of the best left-backs in the world, he’s English, it’s a World Cup year; come on people, let’s get our priorities straight). The trouble is, while I don’t think it’s important, I do rather want to know, because it’s a good piece of gossip. We have such an ambiguous relationship with the idea of celebrity privacy; I don’t actually want to cause Cole any more upset than he’s dealing with already, but I can’t resist poking around the internet for the details and repeating some of them here.

There must be a few thousand professional footballers in the UK; surely at least one or two are gay. This would be a better country if they didn’t feel they had to keep it a secret, and someone is going to have to be the first to come out since Justin Fashanu. Fashanu, though, ended up hanging himself. Even in the 8 years since that happened, I think the public’s attitude to homosexuality has probably moved on a lot, but between football crowds and the tabloid media, it would be seriously tough for anyone to have to deal with. It would be nice to think that the fans might surprise us by taking it all in their stride, but at the recent Liverpool/Manchester United match, the Liverpool fans were chanting about the Munich air disaster and the Man U fans were chanting about Hillsborough, so we’re not talking about models of sensitivity here.

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Other

Ah, the first stirrings of young love…

You know what they say: Once you go Mac, you never go back.

I don’t want to come over *too* Apple-fanboy. I know they’re just a more expensive way of doing all the same things you can do on a PC. What I find quite interesting, though, is how much people seem to miss the point. Whenever Apple discussions start on the net, you get frustrated geeks tearing their hair out at the irrationality of buying a Mac/iPod when you can get a rival product with the same specs for less money, and the accusation is that people are just buying into the stylish marketing, that it’s all design and therefore superficial. But when Apple are at their best, and most Apple-y, it’s not superficial – it’s design all the way down. The marketing is stylish, the online shop is attractive and easy to use, the box it comes in looks cool, the actual machine is even cooler-looking; but really what matters is that the software is uncluttered and easy to use. I have no idea whether the underlying system architecture and the hardware are well-designed, but they seem to work pretty consistently. The cosmetic stuff is a reflection of a design philosophy that makes the user experience a priority instead of an afterthought. Which isn’t to say that Apple have never made any stupid decisions or bad products, but at least they understand that design actually matters and they try to make a good job of it.

We should be able to take good design for granted. It shouldn’t be a luxury.

Categories
Nature

bird-bait

A new bird came to the feeders today – a sparrowhawk. There are some feeders hanging on a pole, and the hawk came in and banked round between the pole and the feeder, obviously intending to grab a bird on the way past. I don’t think he actually got one, but it was a hang on, what’s … a sparrowha.. gone kind of experience, so I couldn’t really tell. In fact it was so fleeting that I’m only confident of the identification because I got a surprisingly clear impression of the colours – blue-grey back and rufousy underneath.

(that’s not taken by me (I wish!); it’s © namq on Flickr)

So that was cool. There are a remarkable number of people in this country who feed the little birdies and enthuse about them, but turn into bloodthirsty nutters at the thought of jays, magpies, and sparrowhawks. It’s quite true, they do eat the smaller birds, but so what; that’s just what they do. The people who write letters to the Times about how many magpies they’ve trapped and killed, and how much more birdsong they think there is as a result, just seem barmy to me. I’m more than happy to sacrifice a few goldfinches in exchange for an occasional flash of russet and blue whipping past the feeders.

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Me Other

Ajax and the common man

One of the hot new(ish) things in web design is Ajax – standing for Asynchronous Javascript And Xml. To quote Wikipedia, “The intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire Web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user makes a change.” You’ll have seen the results on websites like Flickr, where you can edit the descriptions on your photos without having to load a new page. An impressive example of an Ajax-rich WordPress theme can be seen here; click on the buttons at the top to get the full effect.

Which is great, of course. Except that one of the joys of the internet is its accessibility for the casual user who wants to make a webpage. HTML is, really, an extremely simple system to use. CSS means a bit more to learn, but once you get the hang of it, it actually makes your life easier. And that’s all you need to arrange content on a page. If you just want to create a static webpage, you can do it entirely from scratch just with HTML and CSS, and how good the content is and how good it looks are entirely up to you.

Even using software like WordPress, it’s easy enough to just use some knowledge of HTML and CSS to restyle the output. The software is built in PHP, and you just have to work around the PHP tags, moving them around as necessary; it’s usually obvious from context what they do. So you can completely change the look of a site without doing any of what I’d call real coding. The various changes to the appearance of this site and its predecessors have all been done without me knowing any PHP. Ajax kills that, as far as I can tell; hacking around a theme to change the styling becomes a suddenly much more technical exercise.

I completely see the point of Ajax – when it’s used well, it transforms the user experience. And I’m not suggesting that anyone stop using it just for my sake. New software makes it easier and easier for people who know little about computers to share their thoughts and pictures on net; it’s just an unfortunate side-effect that as the software gets more sophisticated, it gets harder for a dabbler like me to get my hands dirty and tinker with the machinery.

I guess it’s a natural progression with all technologies. In the early days of motoring, you *had* to know how to do basic repairs to your car by the side of the road, and the engine was simple enough that you could probably do it with a couple of spanners and a can of oil. The fact that cars are now so reliable that you barely need to know how to check your oil and tyre pressure is a Good Thing, of course. But it still seems a pity when things get professionalised out of people’s hands to the point where they never get to do things themselves from scratch, whether it’s baking bread or creating a webpage.

Categories
Culture

Mask of the Week

Another Mardi Gras post. This time, a Mardi Gras Indian:

via jass.com.

Categories
Culture Me Other

Homemade bacon

I’ve been enjoying Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall’s Big Book Of Meat. It’s incredibly thorough in giving you all the information you need to understand how to buy, prepare and cook meat for the best results; even without any recipes it would be worth owning. I’ve just tried his recipe for curing your own bacon.

Basically, you make a cure mix of salt, sugar, bay, juniper and black pepper, and rub it into a piece of pork belly once a day for five days, pouring off any liquid that gets pulled out of the meat. And that’s it. If you also include saltpetre, it keeps it pink, but I didn’t bother with that. I’m using chunks of it in a beef and Guinness stew – HFW is very keen on the importance of adding bacon to stews – but I fried a couple of scraps to see what it was like, and apart from going white when cooked it tasted just like proper, high quality bacon. Presumably if I’d used saltpetre it would have stayed pink. This is my lump of bacon with a lump cut off it:

EDIT:

I forgot to say: one of the less important things I like about the HFW book is that all the measurements are in metric. In this country, we’ve theoretically been moving to the metric system for the past 40 years, and still everyone uses a mishmash of units – feet and inches for people’s heights, metres for building specs, miles for road distances, pints for beer – and it’s ridiculous. We should just get our collective act together and stop whinging about it. Food is sold in metric units anyway, by law, so why do all cookbooks still have two sets of quantities in all the recipes?